I consult on content strategy for technology companies and produce web content for entrepreneurs and business owners. Currently I am traveling around the USA on an 8-month roadtrip (in a bright blue RV) exploring 3D Printing, 3D Scanning, and 3D Design. In the past, I have put pen to paper for the Wall Street Journal, Make, Sports Afield, the Pittsburgh Business Times and many others. You can follow my work via Twitter, Google+, or my site: RefineDigital.com

Standing on the Sun Explains New Rules of Capitalism

The authors reference Adafruit because of the $3,000 reward challenge they offered to anyone who could hack the Microsoft Kinect 3D system with an open source software driver. Microsoft’s legal department chimed in until they realized that this sort of collaboration (not with Adafruit, but the community at large) could be beneficial and symbiotic. Most maker companies already understand this. Hackerspaces and makerspaces thrive because of this energy, enthusiasm, and synergy. Why did they share this example? Read the next quote:

“Because we believe that in economies driven by innovation and growth, populated by digital natives, and not indoctrinated with regard to controlling intellectual property, such behavior will become the mainstream, not the fringe—and will confer an important advantage. Is it a dynamic that will come to characterize the entire economy? It’s hard to tell. Surely much collaboration will continue to be done explicitly, with clearly delineated contributors joining forces to achieve carefully architected outcomes.” This is the invisible handshake.

This handshake has more power potentially in emerging economies, which is one of their main points. These new capitalist thinkers don’t have the US baggage of what a business or company should look like. This isn’t to say that some in the US can’t or won’t be as innovative, disruptive, and adaptive. They have also called this phenomenon “Runaway Capitalism” and if you search that term you’ll find a great post at the Harvard Business Review.

The only irony and one that probably did not escape the authors is that their book sits with a copyright on it and not a Creative Commons Share Alike type license. All in all, this book has some solid thinking about the future and where business is headed. It is a heavy read in some spots, but enlightening and stimulating. Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere. (Amazon direct, non-affiliate link, for reader convenience). I recommend it for makers, hackers, and inventors.

A favorite quote that I liked from the book and just had to include as a P.S.:

“It’s a little fanciful, but think of a 3-D printer as a seed. Plant one in a village. If it’s a RepRap seed (and you have the raw materials to fertilize it with), it will yield more seeds. And if there’s a network, the village can have access to all the designs in Neil Gershenfeld’s (MIT Center for Bits and Atoms) open source libraries—and everyone else’s. To sum it all up, if information can be free and if goods are just information plus resin, then goods can be pretty close to free.”

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“It’s a little fanciful, but think of a 3-D printer as a seed. Plant one in a village. If it’s a RepRap seed (and you have the raw materials to fertilize it with), it will yield more seeds. And if there’s a network, the village can have access to all the designs in Neil Gershenfeld’s (MIT Center for Bits and Atoms) open source libraries—and everyone else’s. To sum it all up, if information can be free and if goods are just information plus resin, then goods can be pretty close to free.”

Speaking as a former member of the Reprap core team it seems more than a bit contrived to link the uber-cheap Reprap project with Gershenfeld’s insanely expensive FabLab undertaking. I know US media has long loved to give the Ivy League credit for things they didn’t do, but this is a bit of a stretch even granting that well-known bias. :-)

Thanks for your comment plaasjaapie. I see your point about the fablab cost. I’d like to see a super low cost maker lab get started. Have you seen any? I don’t think the authors are trying to give credit to MIT for the RepRap, but maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment. I’ll have to reread the book quote I shared in its full context and see where they were going with it.

Geesh I feel old. My heroes growing up were Henry Ford, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison. Capitalism may take a while to die out. Long ago I read a book written by an ex-WWII soldier who said it was obvious to him that the purpose of captalism was to eventually eliminate work. OK I’m for that. We’ll just sit on the beach and have philosophical conversations. Go to restaurants in vehicles that drive themselves and be served by robots. All of us. The entire population of Earth. OKay, I’m for that too. It would be great too, if gold had no value huh? Only don’t hold your breath. The things that make capitalism work are not all about manufacturing.

Geesh I feel old. My heroes growing up were Henry Ford, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison. Capitalism may take a while to die out. Long ago I read a book written by an ex-WWII soldier who said it was obvious to him that the purpose of captalism was to eventually eliminate work. machines and Robots would do all the work.

OK I’m for that. We’ll just sit on the beach and have philosophical conversations. Go to restaurants in vehicles that drive themselves and be served by robots. All of us. The entire population of Earth. OKay, I’m for that too. It would be great too, if gold had no value huh? Only don’t hold your breath. The things that make capitalism work are not all about manufacturing.

Contrary to what its founder envisioned, capitalism has been transmogrified into a device for creating wealth – not for the masses of people as Adam Smith declared, but for a select group of immensely wealthy individuals and corporations, The result is what we have in the United States – a plutocracy as far removed from the democratic model as another founder’s Utopia turned out in the former Soviet Union. Present-day capitalism has no moral or ethical basis, nor has it any loyalty to any country. Its only value is money. For some of us, that’s enough.